Enter your rules once
You fill in a form. Every logging program that supports ACD then reads exactly the same entry, instead of each one reading your rules page on its own.
Open standard · free to use
Your rules. Read the same way by every program.
Today your contest rules live as text on your website. Every logging program reads that text and types the rules in by hand — and every one of them reads it a little differently. That is where most scoring disagreements come from.
contestdatabase.org is a free, open register. A contest is written down once, including how points are counted, in a form a computer can follow without guessing. We are a register, not a software company: your own rules document stays the authority, and we link to it.
One score, or three different ones
Today
Your rules page
text on your website
each program types it in by hand
- Logger A 1,240
- Logger B 1,180
- Logger C 1,240
One entrant is shown a score you never awarded.
With ACD
One dated entry
written by you, linked to your rules
every program reads the same entry
- Logger A 1,240
- Logger B 1,240
- Logger C 1,240
Everyone sees the score you actually awarded.
The same rules, typed in five times
A rule change has to reach your own document, every logging program, and whatever you use to check the results — separately, and usually by hand. Nobody is doing anything wrong. There is simply no single place where the rules exist in a form a program can read.
The cost lands on you. Every year the same questions arrive by mail, every year a few entrants submit logs scored by software that read one line differently, and every year somebody has to explain the same rule again.
How it works today
- Your rules page — text, rewritten each year
- Logging program A — one reading, typed in by hand
- Logging program B — another reading, slightly different
- Your scoring check — a third reading
- Contest calendars — dates copied over by hand
How it works with ACD
- One entry, written by you — dated, and never changed afterwards
- Everyone reads the same entry — your document stays the authority
What you get out of it
You do not need to understand the format, and you will never see a file. This is what changes for the person who runs a contest.
Fewer arguments afterwards
When the software your entrants use counts points the same way you do, the score on their screen matches the score in your results. Most disputes never start.
Your rulebook stays yours
We do not replace your rules document and we do not reinterpret it. The entry links to your page, and your page remains the official text.
You cannot break it by accident
Once an entry is published it is never changed again — not even by us. A correction becomes a new dated entry, so nobody is ever scored against rules that quietly moved.
It costs nothing
No fee, no account you have to keep, no exclusivity. Listing your contest here does not stop you publishing it anywhere else, in any form.
You can walk away with your data
Everything here is meant to be downloadable in full, under a free licence, with a copy kept in a public Git repository. If this project ever stops, the entries do not disappear with it.
What is actually written down
A contest entry has five parts. Four of them are simple lists of facts. The fifth, how points are counted, is the one that took real work.
Identity
Which contest this is, who runs it, and a link to the official rules.
CQ World Wide DX Contest, SSB — run by CQ Magazine
Schedule
When it runs, written the way your rules write it.
the last full weekend of October, 48 hours
Operating
Which bands and which modes are allowed.
160 m down to 10 m, SSB only
Exchange
What the two stations have to pass to each other for a contact to count.
a signal report and your CQ zone
Scoring
How many points a contact is worth, what multiplies the total, and the final sum.
0 to 3 points per contact, multiplied by zones and countries
Every score written down here is the score a single log claims for itself. The official result after all logs are cross-checked is yours to declare, and nothing here tries to replace it.
identity
schedule
operating
exchange
scoring
The hard part: counting points
This is the real test of whether a format is any use. Rules for points are almost always a list read from the top, where the first line that fits decides — and that order carries meaning.
These are the actual point rules of CQ WW. Read them from the top and stop at the first line that applies to the contact.
Rule 3 only ever catches two stations that are both in North America — if the other station were on another continent, rule 2 would already have caught it. Move rule 3 above rule 2 and the contest is scored wrong from then on, quietly: the entry still looks perfectly correct.
So the order is written down as part of the rules, and the form that sponsors will use keeps it visible and numbered. That is the single most important thing this project has to get right.
Points per contact — first line that fits wins
- 1 The other station is in your own country 0
worked.country == me.countrycounts for multipliers, but not for points
- 2 The other station is on a different continent 3
worked.cont != me.cont - 3 You are in North America 2
me.cont == 'NA'only ever reached because rule 2 sits above it
- 4 Everything else 1
elseexactly one of these, always last
Rules change. Old results stay correct.
Your rules will not read the same in ten years as they do today, and that is normal. So an entry is never overwritten — it is dated, and the old wording stays available.
The contest
Stays the same
"CQ World Wide DX Contest, SSB" is one contest, whatever changes around it. It keeps one identity for good.
A dated version
One exact wording
Each time the rules change, the new wording is added as a new version. The old one is kept, marked as replaced, and stays readable.
One running
One year of it
CQ WW SSB 2026 has real start and end times in UTC, and is tied to the reference lists that applied that year.
Why the year matters
Which callsign belongs to which country is itself a list that changes several times a year. The same log checked against two different versions of that list can come out with two different scores. So every running of a contest records which version applied — otherwise a result cannot honestly be recalculated later.
Published means finished
A published entry is never edited again. Not for a typo, not for a comma, not by an administrator. Once somebody's software refers to a dated entry, changing it quietly would falsify their score — which is the exact problem this project exists to remove.
draft published replaced only the draft can be edited
What we do not do
The scope is kept deliberately narrow. That is what makes the part that does exist worth trusting.
We do not take logs
No uploads, no entrant scores, no league tables. This is a register of rules, nothing more.
We do not declare results
Only you hold every log, so only you can declare the official result. We only ever describe what a single log claims for itself.
We do not sell software
We publish the rules and the tests an implementation has to pass. Writing the software is the logging programs' job, not ours.
We do not replace log formats
Cabrillo, EDI and ADIF already handle sending a log in. ACD describes the rules, not the submission.
Where this actually stands
An honest answer is worth more than a polished one, so here is the state of it. Nothing on this site is live yet.
- 0.1 Format version
- Early. The format is still allowed to change, and it has been changing.
- 6 Contests written out
- By hand, in full, from the real rulebooks — before any software was written.
- 0 Contests published here
- The register itself is still being built. Nothing can be entered yet.
Six contests, by hand, before a line of code
A format that has never been tried against a real contest is an opinion, not a standard. So six real contests were written out by hand first, each one chosen because it was awkward in a different way, and every worked example was calculated on paper before any software existed.
Every part of the format exists because one of those six needed it. Nothing was added on the chance it might be useful later.
| Contest | What it forced us to fix |
|---|---|
| Helvetia | an exchange that changes depending on who you are |
| CQ WW SSB | two different country lists side by side |
| CQ WPX SSB | points given as a table, and a prefix worked out from the callsign |
| ARRL DX SSB | two kinds of multiplier in one contest |
| ARRL Sweepstakes SSB | a contest that looks nothing up at all |
| IARU R1 145 MHz | points calculated from distance, and no Cabrillo |
"And if you lose interest in two years?"
Every sponsor asks that, and they are right to. The answer cannot be "trust us". We are committed to a complete daily download of every entry under a free licence, plus a copy kept in a public Git repository, so the data survives without us.
not yet available None of that is running yet, and the licence has not been chosen. It is a commitment, not something you can click today — and we would rather say so than let you find out later.
Writing logging software?
Everything a parser needs is on the specification page: the document layout, the closed vocabularies, the primitive contracts, the JSON Schema, and the test vectors that decide whether an implementation is conformant.